A Strange Cocktail
Sunday May 23, 2010
Some months ago, I received a newsletter from a Buddhist retreat centre with information about recent events. And because this is a place where I have spent several very enjoyable retreats, I sat down with a cup of tea to read through. About half way in to the newsletter, I came across an article about some changes that were being considered at the centre. They were planning to dig a well somewhere in the grounds, and so they had called in the services of a dowser to find a suitable position.
At this point I recalled my own – admittedly rather limited – personal experience of dowsing. When I was about eleven, some friends and I attempted to dowse for Easter eggs during an Easter egg hunt. We picked up a forked twig and hurtled around uncovering chocolate eggs. Every one we found we took to be evidence of the power of the twig; nevertheless, by the end of the egg hunt, I do not recall us having found any more eggs than any other participants. I don’t think I ever tried dowsing again.
It seemed puzzling to me that this organisation should see fit to employ a dowser to find ground water, a procedure that soon after it was first described in the sixteenth century – not generally thought of as the most sceptical of eras – was already considered somewhat dubious. After all, the overwhelming evidence seems to be that, in testing conditions, dowsing simply does not work (there’s a summary on James Randi’s site here and another here). As a result of this mass of evidence, when an organisation like the British Society of Dowsers claims to be interested in exploring the “scientific principles” of dowsing, it is hard not to think that they are being a bit premature: we need to know that there is a phenomenon in need of explanation before exploring the scientific principles of this phenomenon.
Of course there’s probably no more harm in employing a dowser than there is in employing other more contemporary smoke-and-mirrors magicians, such as a branding or PR consultant. But I’m not sure there’s any point to it either. But leaving the supposed virtues or otherwise of dowsing (there will be comments, no doubt…) to one side, what I am interested in is another question: what is the connection between dowsing and a meditation retreat centre?
The answer, from the outside, is obvious: that Western Buddhists are part of a much larger world of curious beliefs, ranging from dowsing to homoeopathy to crystal healing to angel spirit guides, a well-meaning hodge-podge lacking in much rigour and in which it is possible to move seamlessly from talking about the neuroscientific evidence for the benefits of meditation to talking about ley lines, reiki and how to find your shamanic power animal. And in these kinds of situations, it is considered somewhat unseemly to raise questions about pesky things like evidence, or how all this is supposed to work or hang together. It is this hodge-podge that has, over the years, made me increasingly uneasy with the various forms of Buddhism in the West, and the broader cultural context in which Buddhist practice takes place.
Sometimes it seems that Buddhism in the West is a strange cocktail indeed: 1/3 Blavatskyian new age speculation; 1/3 distillation of Buddhist texts; 1/3 psychobabble; and a pinch of science for added flavour (optional). Shake vigorously, warm slightly over the fires of good intentions, and consume. There. Now don’t you feel better already?
Have your say! [19]
On the dangers of being too philosophical...
Sunday May 9, 2010
As many visitors to thinkBuddha.org may know, Middlesex University has decided to phase out its philosophy programme on the grounds that it is of no financial value. This, despite the fact that philosophy was the highest rated research subject at Middlesex – for what it is worth – in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (which, to those of you who are uninitiated, was the name given to the mildly demented bureaucratic procedure for judging the quality of university research outputs, now superseded by the arguably rather more demented Research Excellence Framework. But I digress…)
This is, perhaps, only the beginning. Now that the election here in the UK has come and gone, there is much talk of public spending cuts, and higher education will be in the firing line. The message, increasingly, is only those courses that can serve the interests of the business world will be the ones to survive. The tender-hearted amongst us (and, alas, I am one such sensitive soul) might protest that surely there is more to education than serving the interests of the business world. But this seems not to be the common view. Just over a year ago, I put this very question to a high-ranking university official who I chanced to meet. “I understand,” I said, “that universities are keen on forging links with business, but what happens when there are conflicts of interest, when pedagogical and intellectual demands conflict with the interests of the business concerned?”
He hesitated. “Well…” he said, “I think possible to get too philosophical about these kinds of questions.” Then he went on to explain that there never had been any such conflicts of interest at the institution with which he was involved. This, I suggested, struck me as more than a little odd. Surely there should be conflicts of interest in any such collaborations, and surely these conflicts were the kinds of things that demanded that we should get just a little bit philosophical about some of the issues involved.
But the moment had passed and the conversation moved on. One cannot, apparently, be too philosophical in the world of higher education. This is something that the philosophers at Middlesex have found out to their cost. And they will not be the last. All of which is bad for higher education. But philosophy itself has not – after all – always lived in the academy; and it may not necessarily flourish best in these circumstances. When I lived in Durham about a decade ago, there was a curious individual who two or three times a week used to set up a table and a couple of chairs on a bridge over the river Wear. On the table he placed a sign reading something like “Philosopher: Please talk to me (free of charge)”. I now regret that I never took him up on his offer. Who knows what I may have learned, what wisdom he may have been able to impart?
This is hardly a utopian vision; but perhaps in the coming years, on the bridges of our cities, we can look forward to a flowering of philosophers and sages, each setting up their stall, where those seeking genuine wisdom might come to debate the deeper questions of life’s mysteries and problems. At the very least, those who want to ask these kinds of questions might save on spiralling tuition fees, leaving the universities to go about their serenely unphilosophical work of serving the interests of the world of business whilst they themselves get on with asking the serious questions presented by human life.
For a petition to save philosophy at Middlesex go here.
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The Madhyamaka Bus?
Thursday February 5, 2009
Last Thursday, there was a piece in the Guardian newspaper about the current struggle for the souls of the nation being played out on the sides of London buses. It started with an advertising campaign launched back in January by the British Humanist Association and luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and A. C. Grayling, in which the advertising space on a number of London buses was emblazoned with the words: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The appearance of these so-called atheist buses led to at least one hundred and fifty complaints being registered with the advertising standards people, on the grounds that this slogan was offensive and that here was a claim that could not be substantiated.
Fear of claims incapable of substantiation does not seem to have hindered The Christian Party, however. Under the leadership of Rev. George Hargreaves, they have just announced that they are countering with the following slogan, similarly emblazoned: “There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life.” The move from ‘probably’ to ‘definitely’ seems, to my mind, to be a retrograde step, and the Christian Party have failed to iron out the apparent non sequitur lurking in the original; but it is rather touching, nevertheless, to see that Professors Dawkins and Grayling are united with the Rev. Hargreaves in wishing our well-being and enjoyment.
At this stage in proceedings, it seems to me that there’s no reason for Buddhists not to pitch in and join the fun. My proposal is for a Madhyamaka bus bearing the following well-known verse from the Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā of the philosopher Nāgārjuna:
Neither an entity nor a nonentity
Moves in any of the three ways.
So motion, bus
and route are nonexistent.
Oh, and why not enjoy your life while you are at it?
Image: FordPrefect on Wikimedia.org, Creative Commons ShareAlike
Nagarjuna quotation adapted from Jay Garfield’s
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On Advertising
Tuesday January 13, 2009
Occasionally I get emails of effusive praise for this blog from people who, curiously enough, seem to have only the scantiest acquaintance with it. And when there is this curious combination of effusive praise and minimal acquaintance, I know that I only have to read on a sentence or two to see that the email writer has some product that they want me to advertise here, in return for a small consideration. When I receive these emails, I generally reply by saying as delicately as I can that although their product sounds fascinating, in general I do not carry adverts on the site. The reasons for this are several. Firstly, because I fondly imagine that people come to this site either a) by accident or b) because they have a passing interest in reading what I have written, and not c) because they have an overwhelming desire to buy more stuff. Secondly, because advertisements are pretty unaesthetic, when it comes down to it. Thirdly, because I don’t want to recommend things that I haven’t checked out myself. And fourthly, because not carrying advertising allows me to maintain a kind of freedom that I suspect I would not otherwise have.
However, if last night’s programme on BBC Radio4 is anything to go by, I’m clearly missing out, because advertising is apparently the most fun that you can have with your clothes still on (although I’m not sure who advertising is supposed to be this much fun for – the advertisers or the advertisees). It was, I confess, a rather alarming broadcast. It began with advertising executive and presenter Robert Wright boldly claiming that the advertising industry increases the sum total of happiness in the world. The evidence mounted for this was both slight and spurious. Wright supported his claim by saying that brain science shows (one should always beware of claims that begin with words such as “Scientists have found…”) that when one buys a luxury product, it “releases pleasure energy” (I’m not entirely sure what this is, but I’ll let it pass) inside the brain.
Call me obstinate, but on this basis of this argument, I am unpersuaded. For whilst it is no doubt true that there is a kind of pleasure in acquisition of things, it is also the case that the stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centres does not correlate with an increase in happiness. Happiness, whatever it actually means – as the ancient philosophers knew – is clearly not the same thing as pleasure. Even those pleasure-loving Epicureans knew that there are pleasures and pleasures and that some pleasures are conducive to happiness, whilst others are positively harmful.
In blurring the distinction between happiness and pleasure, Wright effectively sidestepped the serious moral issues raised by the advertising industry. For, contrary to the upbeat nature of the radio programme, there is quite a lot of credible research that suggests that the free rein given to advertisers is extremely harmful, and that indicates that what unchecked advertising spreads is not happiness, but, on the contrary, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. This tendency to sidestep wider moral questions was particularly worrying given that much of the programme was given over to an exploration of the increasing interest that the advertising industry is taking in brain science.
One of the interviewees was Gemma Calvert, professor of neuro-imaging at Warwick University and founder of neuro-marketing company Neurosense. Professor Calvert had a breezily positive view of how it might be to all of our benefit if advertisers paid closer attention to the developing understanding of brain function that is taking place in the sciences. Her argument was, more or less, this: that with a closer understanding of the way the brain works, the advertising industry can much more effectively target their campaigns, and can therefore design products that people want, thereby reducing advertising “clutter”. “We are trying to find out what you do want,” Professor Calvert said, “in order to sell you things that you are going to buy and that are going to produce greater experiences.”
The problem here is with that seemingly innocuous word “want”. Most of the time, advertising is not a matter of responding to pre-existing wants – let alone needs – but is instead a matter of creating wants where formerly they do not exist. If I invent a new brand of chocolate, then for anybody to want it, I have tell people that exists and to persuade them that they might want it: the advertising is logically prior to the wanting.
There is, no doubt, a place for advertising, but it is hard not to be concerned about the increasing reach of the advertisers in selling us things that hitherto we didn’t know we needed; and in the face of mounting evidence that much advertising is destructive of human happiness, there is a good case for increased regulation. But given that the prevailing economic wisdom, such as it is, insists – contrary to most of the evidence – that happiness and social justice can only be secured if we continue to spend our money and to acquire things that we do not need, that does not seem likely to happen any time soon.
Have your say! [5]
Risk
Wednesday November 12, 2008
One of the more dubious pleasures of beginning a new job is that of the inevitable round of Health and Safety inductions. Of course, we all know that these sessions are important – it’s always nice to get home from work in the evening with all your limbs intact – but in my experience, if you get any room of otherwise sensible adults together in front of a Health and Safety training film, it is inevitable that in a few moments you will be able to feel the ripple of naughtiness and petty rebellion pass through the audience. There is something inherently funny about those training videos in which you get to witness bad actors demonstrating how it is possible to turn one’s workplace into a place of misery, pain and death, simply by failing to wipe up their spilled coffee, or by standing on rotating chairs to swat passing wasps, and it is made funnier by the fact that you know that these are, in fact, serious matters.
This concern with Health and Safety – which I am capitalising out of deference to its advocates, who tend to do the same – is by its very nature a strange chimera, constructed in part (and at its best) out of genuine concern for human welfare and in part (and at its worst) out of the fear of litigation. But as I was sitting the other week through an afternoon of horrors the of spilled coffees and rotating-chair supported wasp-swatting, I found myself wondering about the kinds of world-view behind much of our present concern with Health and Safety.
The thing that puzzled me most was this. We were given a ‘quiz’ to start the session (quizzes, in this context, are believed to be fun) consisting of a number of statements which we had to mark ‘true’ or ‘false’. The first two statements were as follows:
- All accidents are the result of human error.
- All accidents are preventable.
Now, I just knew that the required answer for each of these statements was ‘True’. But I simply could not find it in myself to tick that box. So I ticked ‘No’ instead, and I was rewarded by big red crosses (rather than by nice green ticks), because this answer was, in the strange world of Health and Safety thinking, palpably wrong. I would have argued the case, but having in an earlier induction session that morning already been told that one can be too philosophical (too philosophical? And in a university as well – the shame of it!), I decided to let it pass.
The first of these statements may come down to a simple matter of definition. If we define an accident as a misfortune caused by human error, then this is necessarily and by definition true. But if as I head to work later today I am hit by a meteorite and never get up again, then my friends might say “What a tragic accident”, and I don’t think that they could be accused of a misuse of language. Of course it could in this context be seen as human error that I did not wear a hard-hat as I walked down the high-street, but I think that this is stretching the point rather.
But what about the second question, if we simply restrict ourselves to those things where human error is involved: all accidents are preventable? My objection here relates to the tense in which it is expressed. If the claim is that “all accidents in which human error is involved could have been prevented “, then I have no problem with this. But the thing I do have a problem with is the claim that all things could have been prevented can be prevented, because it puts too high a demand upon human knowledge of the unintended consequences of actions. Errancy is a part of human action – the mind takes short-cuts, we cannot wait until all the data is in before we act. As a result, risk – even leaving aside the falling of meteors and thinking only about human error – is ineradicable. This does not mean that we should throw caution to the wind, but it does mean that in thinking about human action and human welfare (as well as in thinking about our legislative frameworks), we should recognise that knowledge after the fact about what should have been done is not the same as knowledge before the fact, and that living in the world means that risk is an inescapable aspect of our lives.
The image illustrating this post, incidentally, is a 12th century picture of the Ladder of Divine Ascent. Your challenge for today is to identify how many different health and safety risks are being taken by those foolish saints. Have fun!
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On Gods and Nations
Friday August 22, 2008
Not that long ago I wrote on this blog about the attitude we have here in the UK to religion in public life – that, whilst on this curious little island where I was born we don’t like religion to be particularly demonstrative, we somehow have the vague idea that religion is a Good Thing, if it is kept within its proper bounds. Religious enthusiasm is not something that we particularly go in for (although there are no doubt exceptions), and in general we prefer a rather more mild-mannered approach to religion.
The archetypal religious meeting in the UK is some kind of a gathering at which the faithful get together to mumble their various prayers and perform their assorted rituals, and then everyone files out to consume endless urns full of weak tea, and to nibble nervously upon stale biscuits. I have attended Quaker meetings, Anglican church services, Methodist services, Baha’i meetings, numerous Buddhist groups, and at all of them, I have found, at one point or another, myself holding a tepid cup of tea and a biscuit, usually a Rich Tea or a Digestive (or at least the local budget supermarket’s Own Brand version thereof). Indeed, sometimes you would not know whether you are at an Anglican gathering or at a Buddhist gathering at all, were it not for the fact that at the former you are fairly certain to get cow’s milk in your tea, and at the latter you will more likely have soya milk.
In my earlier post, I expressed some unease with this mild-mannered approach to religion. Say what you like about extremists, but at least you know where you are with them. They don’t mess around. Extremists – and here I am only surmising – don’t have weak tea and biscuits and mild chit-chat at their meetings. Instead they swing one way or the other – either opulent feasts of monkeys’ brains and the braised livers of their enemies or ascetic meals consisting only of water and of single grains of rice.
I have been thinking about religion in the UK again, in part due to the article I read in yesterday’s Guardian, written by philosopher A.C. Grayling (who seems to be so prolific at the moment, that I cannot escape from the secret suspicion that there is not one A.C. Grayling but three – three identical A.C. Grayling triplets, all philosophising away busily, and if this is so, who are we to complain?). In the article, Grayling wrote about David Miliband, the MP for South Shields and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. As Grayling pointed out, it is not unthinkable that David Miliband could – in the near or more distant future – become Prime Minister, and this would mean something rather astonishing: for the first time, we would have an atheist for prime minister in the UK. Grayling went on to talk about the benefits that there might be of such a change.
Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq.
Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from laws, and having seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism, satire and challenge.
Atheist leaders are going to be more sceptical about inculcating sectarian beliefs into small children ghettoised into publicly funded faith-based schools, risking social divisiveness and possible future conflict. They will be readier to learn Northern Ireland’s bleak lesson in this regard.
And so on. Now, to a large degree, I am in sympathy with Grayling (or even with all three of them). Here in the UK, the way that religion is tangled up with public life is deeply peculiar and is in need of some clear thinking and straightening out. On balance, I think that faith schools are a bad idea. I certainly agree with Grayling about the disproportionate influence of the Church of England in public life. And I believe that the claims that are made by religious groups that religion is good for us, as Daniel Dennett argued at length several years ago, are claims that, at the very least, should not be taken at face value, but that should be opened up to empirical research.
But I wonder if Grayling’s hopes for an atheist prime minister are rather too optimistic. Even if Miliband were to become Prime Minister, and even if he were to do many of the eminently sensible things that Grayling suggests, I am not sure whether we’d be entirely free from the supposed dangers of belief in mystical entities.
After all, it seems to me that ‘God’ belongs to a larger class of privileged objects that all share the same properties.
- They are all very big.
- They are – within their boundaries – omnipresent.
- They all demand – and inspire – allegiance.
- They are assumed, by those who speak for them, to be good by nature.
- They are all (at least in a sense) eternal
- They inspire fraternity in those who claim allegiance to them
Objects of this kind could include Gods and deities, but they could also include secular creeds, ideologies and Nation States. Nation States are also Big Things. They are as omnipresent as Gods, at least within their de facto boundaries and sometimes (it is claimed by their adherents) beyond them. They demand allegiance, and there are very real penalties for those who do not respond favourably to this demand. They are also assumed to be essentially good (noble, true, upright, brave, strong, etc. etc.). No national myth, unfortunately, reads as follows: “We’re just a bunch of confused and jittery mammals with big brains that, more often than not, get us into trouble.” They also claim for themselves a kind of eternity (from the frankly embarrassing Rule Britannia to the bellicose Star Spangled Banner): Nations, in national mythology, have existed since time immemorial. Like Gods, they are primordial entities. And finally, they inspire a sense of kinship between their subjects, so that we might well kill or die for countless others we have never met, for the sake of the Nation.
In his book Imagined Communities
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Karma, Retribution and the Actress
Friday June 6, 2008
Most readers of thinkBuddha will already know about the political fallout from the actress Sharon Stone’s ill-advised comments on the subject of karma to a Hong Kong film crew at Cannes the other week. For those who don’t, the BBC reports (1 and 2) will fill you in on all the necessary details.
What has been interesting in this whole unhappy business is the response from Buddhist commentators, who have almost unanimously claimed that Ms. Stone has misunderstood or misrepresented Buddhism. But is this the case?
The traditions of Buddhism are many and varied, and theories relating to karma are similarly diverse in these different traditions and texts and teachings. And whilst it is no doubt true that there are some of these traditions, texts and teachings clearly at odds with Ms. Stone’s comments, there are many that are uncomfortably close.
An example of this came in an interview between with Lati Rinpoche, the eminent Gelug lama, and Richard Hayes. In the interview, Hayes asked how Buddhists could explain the suffering of the Jews in the Second World War. The answer was troubling.
Rinpoche: The proper Buddhist answer to such a question is that the victims were experiencing the consequences of their actions performed in previous lives. The individual victims must have done something very bad in earlier lives that led to their being treated in this way. Also there is such a thing as collective karma.
Hayes: Do you mean that the Jewish people as a whole have a special karma?
Rinpoche: Yes. All groups have karma that is more than just the collection of the karma of the individuals in the group. For example, a group of people may decide collectively to start a war. If they act on that decision, then the group as a whole will experience the hardships of being at war. Karma is the result of making a decision to act in a certain way. Decisions to act may be made by individuals or by groups. If the decision is made by a group, then the whole group will experience the collective consequences of their decision.
Lati Rinpoche is no renegade, as his biography makes clear. As spiritual adviser to the Dalai Lama, one would imagine that his words carry at least a little weight. And the claim that he is making in this interview is substantially no different from that made by Sharon Stone. It would seem, in the light of this, that her comments are reflective of the most orthodox and learned of sources.
It is possible to claim that Ms. Stone’s comments were profoundly wrong-headed; it is also possible to argue that this retributive view of karma is not only nonsense, but also dangerous nonsense; it is possible make the case for some kind of theory of moral consequence, and to argue that certain Buddhist understandings of karma may help us to formulate such a theory; or it is possible to make the claim that perhaps the theory of karma is so compromised that we’d be better off without it.
What is it not possible to do, however, is to credibly argue that Sharon Stone’s comments were entirely misrepresentative of certain Buddhist ideas. There are many figures and texts of influence in the Buddhist world that have claimed no more and no less than Ms. Stone herself. Would it not be better if those Buddhists keen to dismiss Ms. Stone for her lack of understanding were to turn their attention to the traditions that they revere, so that their own houses might be put in order?
Have your say! [15]
